Woodhouse Recruitment is based in central Melbourne and is a recruitment agency offering recruitment services, including sourcing, screening, and selecting candidates to meet clients’ requirements. The company was established in 2010 by Simon and Petra James, a husband-and-wife team who are the Directors of the company. The company also employs a receptionist, five recruitment consultants and an Administration Manager. The agency plans to recruit a further 2 new consultants to start with the company in early 2018.
The company specialises in the recruitment area of Administration and Office Support, Accounting, IT and Sales and Marketing for both permanent and temporary staff. The company sees its point of difference as being an owner operated, boutique recruitment agency. The company currently has approximately 30 clients who regularly use their services.
At a recent management team meeting, the management team (the Directors, Administration Manager, and the Senior Recruitment Consultant), discussed the need to implement systems and processes for continuous improvement and innovation into the company. This is in part based on the need to stand out from the competitors in an industry where there are many recruitment agencies. Several issues were discussed at the management meeting, which the management team feel need further exploration as part of introducing continuous improvement systems and innovations.
Services Standards
The company states on its web site that it has the following delivery service standards:
- Service Promise: we are clear in what we offer and the benefits it brings to you
- Service Delivery: we offer consistent and reliable service to you
- Customer Relationships: we are open and friendly with all of our customers
- Compliance: we ensure we adhere to all ethical and legal requirement
However, service standards have not been clearly defined and there are no performance indicators in place to measure performance.
Key performance indicators
No formal performance indicators in place to measure key service standards including how quickly candidates are recruited to fill jobs or how many of the candidates pass the trial period effectively.
Social Media
There is no social media strategy in place. Currently the company is not using social media to market positions or to source candidates but recognizes this is an area for development. Currently most candidates are usually found through the existing database (60%) or through advertising on job search web sites.
Staff professional development
While all recruitment consultants are expected to have minimum qualifications and experience, there is no process in place to ensure that recruitment consultants continue to participate in professional development activities to keep their skills up to date. There is also no performance appraisal system in place.
Sustainability
The business currently does not have any formal sustainability initiatives in place and is conscious of moving towards a green office environment both to be an environmentally friendly business, as well as to reduce costs.
Key business performance statistics:
- Annual sales revenue for financial year 20 14 – 2015 is $1,350,000, an increase of 10% from the previous year.
- Increase in profits for this financial year compared to the last one is 9%
- 16% of placements are in the IT area, 18% in accounting, 20$ in sales and marketing and the remainder in administration and office support.
- 60% of revenue is from repeat client business.
- Fill rate is 40% (where fill rate is the number of job orders filled by the number of job orders received multiplied by 100).
- Average time to fill contracts for 2014 were as follows:
- Temporary contracts are 8 days
- Contract work is 20 days
- Permanent search 23 days
- Executive search 33 days
Key performance indicators currently used to measure business performance focus on financial indicators, including net operating profit and sales revenue. The company also tracks its fill rate and is seeking to improve this to the industry average of 47% over the next year.
Part A
Complete the following activities:
- Develop a continuous improvement and innovation report
Review the scenario information and based on your review, select two topics or areas that you can research and review, develop continuous improvement and options and then plan to implement innovative processes for. One of these topics you select must be in relation to improving a sustainability program.
When you have identified the two topics or areas, you will then be required to prepare a report to your manager (your assessor). Your report should be written in clear and concise English and contain relevant headings to address the required information. Your report should be around 3 pages long.
Your report must address the following for both topics:
- Your topics or areas for improvement that you will plan a continuous improvement and innovative processes for, one being a sustainability program
- Identify and discuss a range of strategies that you can implement to monitor and evaluate the current performance and sustainability of your topics/areas for improvement. Identify at least two strategies for each area selected.
- Analyse and provide a detailed account of the current supply chain and the (operational, product or service) systems the business is using to deliver their service. Explain what is working well and what could be improved.
- Identify how the topics/areas for improvement performance could be measured, including an outline of the assessment tools or techniques that could be used. Evaluate the effectiveness of each tool/technique.
- Identify at least two specialists that could help Woodhouse Recruitment. For example, this may be to identify technology and electronic commerce opportunities or to implement your ideas about continuous improvement and innovation. Include their contact details, the services they offer and a rationale as to why it may be beneficial for the company to use their services.
- Conduct research and analyse and report on trends and opportunities relevant to Woodhouse Recruitment in relation to your topics/areas for improvement. Use the resources provided by the assessor as listed under ‘Required’, as well as any other relevant resources.
- Compare Woodhouse Recruitment’s business performance statistics to industry benchmarks and provide an assessment of why or why not the company may not have met their targets.
- Discuss three examples of other innovative business ideas that Woodhouse Recruitment could adopt and implement.
- You participated in a meeting to discuss your continuous improvement and innovation report. During the meeting, you:
- discussed the key findings of your report, and your ideas for continuous improvement and innovation in the business.
- demonstrated your interpersonal skills, as well as your ability to build trust and confidence and encourage creativity in the management team. You did this through your ability to clearly and confidently present information, encouraging questions from the team, discussing/brainstorming ideas and using active listening techniques.
- Made notes as required of the feedback provided.
At the end of the meeting, you took on board feedback provided and agreed with the management team on the best way forward with your continuous improvement and innovation initiatives.
Send an email to all parties involved summarising the ideas agreed to and seeking final agreement to proceed with the initiatives based on the meeting discussion and as summarised in the email. (maximum 100 words)
Part B
Complete the following activities:
- Develop action plan and report
You are required to develop action plans for implementing the continuous improvement and innovation initiatives agreed to in Part A.
You are also required to develop a plan for each agreed initiative.
Your plans should be developed using a project management tool such as a GANTT chart that sets out all the actions required to implement the initiatives including timing, responsibilities, required resources, communication, and key performance indicators for assessing the introduction of the initiative.
In a separate document to accompany the action plan, you are required to develop a short report that includes:
- Discuss the importance of continuous improvement and sustainability as an essential element of business and competition.
- Include a risk assessment for each initiative, identifying the possible risks and how they can be managed. Identify two risks for each initiative and at least two risk management strategies for each.
- Document a cost-benefit analysis for each initiative making assumptions in your analysis including assumed cost and benefits.
- Document the impact of the change and the consequences for staff for each initiative
- Document a brief contingency plan in the event of failure of the initiative
- Send an email to your Manager (your assessor).
The text of the email should be in grammatically correct English, written in an appropriate (polite, business-like) style. It should introduce and summarise the contents of the attachment, seek their feedback and approval to move forward with the project.
Part C
Carefully read the following:
As part of the continuous improvement and innovation review and implementation, Woodhouse Recruitment implemented a formal survey to assess each candidate’s satisfaction with the company’s services. The survey included 15 questions and is focused on the company’s services and desire to improve these. Of the 100 surveys that were sent out by post, only 12 were returned.
Customer survey findings are as follows:
Overall satisfaction with Woodhouse Recruitment:
7 totally satisfied
2 somewhat satisfied
0 dissatisfied
1 totally dissatisfied
No comments provided
Ease of doing business with Woodhouse Recruitment:
5 totally satisfied
4 somewhat satisfied
2 dissatisfied
1 totally dissatisfied
Comments from candidates:
- Got the job I wanted, thanks so much
- Consultants friendly
- Hard to contact consultants
- Didn’t keep us up to date with progress of applications
Customers who said they would recommend Woodhouse Recruitment to others:
5 very much so
4 most likely
2 no, I would not recommend
1 definitely not recommend
Comments from candidates:
- Would definitely recommend
- I would not recommend as I was not happy about the lack of information throughout the process
- I would not recommend. I kept being sent for jobs that just were not right for me.
Complete the following activities:
- Prepare an implementation review report
Review the case study information, and write a short (about one page) report that includes the following:
a. Read the article below and develop an analysis based on your review of this article as to why the survey sent out by Woodhouse Recruitment might have not been effective.
Recruitment Process Feedback
b. Discuss the successes from this type of continuous improvement initiative. Discuss what could Woodhouse Recruitment take from this experience into future efforts to improve performance.
c. Review and analyse the results of the 12 surveys received outlining the results of the customer survey, as well as potential reasons for the low return. Present the results of the survey in bar charts that include the percentages and provide an analysis of the overall customer satisfaction, ease of doing business and customer loyalty. You should also comment on the validity of the findings given the low return.
d. Make recommendations for future customer surveys, including the frequency
